TORONTO – Zella Jackson Price remembers the pain of that day 49 years ago. After giving birth to a premature baby girl, a nurse came into her hospital room and told Jackson Price the terrible news.
“She came up to me three hours later and said your baby passed,” Jackson Price said.
She never knew her daughter was actually alive and put up for adoption. That baby girl is now 49-year-old Diane Gilmore, a mother herself with three children. It was Gilmore’s children who searched for their grandmother. They found Jackson Price and reached out to her using Facebook.
A DNA test confirmed the mother-daughter connection.
“She’s deaf and can’t hear because of measles and I think if she had been with me this would not have happened,” Jackson Price said about Gilmore.
Many are asking if there will ever be justice for the two women and their families in what some are calling a kidnapping. The hospital in St. Louis, Missouri where Gilmore was born closed in 1979.
“I’m still kinda in shock, I don’t know what we’ll find out, what error, what was done, I don’t know what we’ll find out,” said Jackson Price.
For now they are focussed on the joy of their reunion.
“Only time can heal those wounds, only time… it’s a new chapter.”
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